Poet Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky to a mother who was a school teacher and a father who was a banker. Both his parents loved learning and literature and Warren grew up in a house filled with books and book lovers. His father, though aloof, loved poetry most of all, and almost daily he read poetry or history aloud to his children, either before or after dinner. Warren's father was also a free thinker, and encouraged his young son to read Darwin when Warren was fourteen years old.

Warren had another powerful influence on his thinking and writing in his grandfather, who was a Confederate veteran, and who Warren termed "the living symbol of the wild action and romance of the past." At seventeen, Warren received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. However, he was forced to choose another path after his younger brother threw a piece of coal, which landed in Warren's eye. He subsequently lost the eye during surgery. He then decided to enroll at Vanderbilt University to study electrical engineering, but the poetic muse lured him back to the literature and writing departments.

Vanderbilt was famous for its literary group, The Fugitives, and among its members at the time were john Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. Despite his fulfilling college career, Warren was prone to depression. He attempted suicide while he was at Vanderbilt, due to falling behind in his studies and a breakup with his girlfriend.

His first book, John Brown, concerned the famous abolitionist's life and politics. Following his graduation from Vanderbilt he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, then Yale, and was named a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he earned his B.Litt in 1930. During his time at Oxford he met authors Hart Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Upon his return to the United States he began an academic career. He taught at Yale, Vanderbilt, Southwestern College, and Louisiana State University. He accepted a professorship at the University of Minnesota in 1942, where he remained until 1950. He then went to Yale, where he taught for more than two decades, finally becoming professor emeritus.

Despite his travels and decades of living in the northern United States, Warren's heart remained in the south, and its history and culture were presented as themes throughout his work. He once stated, "The place I wanted to live, the place I thought was heaven to me after my years of wandering, was middle Tennessee." Warren did not shy away from southern mindsets and politics. While earlier in his career he had defended segregation, in 1965 he published "Who Speaks For The Negro?" and admitted he had been wrong about segregation.

Warren was also a novelist. He published his first novel, Night Rider, in 1939. The novel dealt with the tobacco war that was taking place between the independent growers in Kentucky and large tobacco companies. His novel, All the King's Men, was based on the colorful and controversial Louisiana politician and demagogue, Huey "the Kingfish" Long. His book, Promises, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1958. While he wrote a total of ten novels, Warren regarded himself as a poet first and a novelist and critic second. T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, according to Warren, served as a major influence on his own work

Warren is considered one of the group known as New Criticism. He married twice, the second time resulted in the births of a son and a daughter. In the 1950s, Warren relocated with his family to rural Vermont. He was diagnosed in the 1980s with cancer; which coincided with the news that he had been named Poet Laureate. He held the post from 1986-1987. Among his other awards are included: the National Medal for Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Prize Fellowship of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He died in Vermont in 1989.